With development of a telecom service, a telecom operator focuses more on flexibility, openness, scalability and service stability of telecom platform. therefore, ATCA plays an important role in a next-generation telecom network.
FIG. 1 is a diagram of board distribution of a typical ATCA 14-slot shelf. Boards in the shelf are divided into front boards and rear boards. A front board may be a HUB BOARD or a NODE BOARD. A rear board is inserted opposite a front board as an interface expansion unit of the front board, and provides an external interface.
An interface connecting a front board to a backplane is defined in area 1 or area 2 by function. An interface, such as a power supply interface or a system management interface, is defined in area 1. A data transmission channel is defined in area 2. FIG. 2 is a schematic diagram of a typical connection between a front board and a rear board. An interface connecting a front board to a rear board is defined in area 3. A front board is connected directly to a rear board via corresponding plugging pieces, without the need of interconnection by a backplane.
At present, a front board is mainly for service processing. Due to a limited size, a rear board can serve only as an expansion to an interface of a front board and provide some simple interfaces such as a keyboard, mouse, or display interface, but can hardly provide strong service processing capability, thus leading to waste of slot resources on the rear board.